WGBH Openvault

The Julia Child Project: The Cold War, France, and the Politics of Food

By Tracey Deutsch

Relations between the US and France were at a lowpoint in the spring of 1966.
The country was still a popular tourist destination, and a cherished resource
of guidelines for cosmopolitan food, art, and even sex. But things were
changing. Anti-American sentiment appeared with increasing frequently in French
popular media—so much so that even tourists took note Charles deGaulle, the
president, had adopted a policy of “gaullism” that meant continual assertion of
France’s geopolitical leadership, resisting cooperation with global political
strategies engineered by the US, and publically criticizing American policy in
southeast Asia. Most notably, in March of that year DeGaulle took France out of
the fledgling North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and demanded that all
American soldiers be evacuated from French soil. The prolonged and
exceptionally violent loss of its empire, most recently Algeria, had left the
nation’s politics, cultural gatekeeping institutions and public life divisive,
if also more diverse, realms. In the midst of this, Julia Child appeared on
American TVs and urged people to make their asparagus “the French way.” What
could Child have meant by this? What did people think she meant? The French
Chef raises these and other questions about food and cooking in the turbulent
1960s. For a decade, Child’s show The French Chef was a mainstay of public
television programming—an important component of families’ evening viewing and
of afternoon cooking plans. Here, cooking the French way meant some very
specific things—working hard physically when necessary (in some episodes she
even panted), peeling vegetables (about this she was very clear), using
appropriate herbs, and making hollandaise by hand. It meant valuing the
traditions of the French food system--epitomized in images of markets and
fishermen. Above all, cooking the French way meant, as she said and
demonstrated repeatedly, treating the work of cooking and eating with serious
purpose and also joyful embrace. It did not necessarily mean engaging in global
politics, but Child could hardly avoid these. After all, she had gone to France
in the first place because of her husband’s State Department posting there
after World War II, made her first forays into cooking as she saw him through
the rigors of life in the 1950s diplomatic corps, and she maintained an
interest in presenting France and its culture in inviting, accessible but also
honest ways. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Childs also remained invested
in France literally. They built a home in Provence, maintained a network of
friends throughout the country,, watched its empire dissolve, hoped for and
then despaired of DeGaulle’s leadership, and stocked gasoline and food when
student and general strikes overturned the nation’s infrastructure in the
spring of 1968. The French Chef, in contrast, presented a much older tradition
of France as the arbiter of taste, the creator of standards and techniques that
were truly universal. It made an argument for the French presence in haute
cuisine, even as she and her viewers navigated a world in which French
authority and its national coherence were increasingly strained. In the context
of the Cold War, we can see The French Chef as an argument for French
culture, and more broadly for cooking itself, as a unifying force in the face
of disintegrating gender and sexual norms, the “quagmire” of French and then
American efforts in Vietnam and southeast Asia, and the ethnic and racial
tensions that characterized life in both countries. Even in this limited realm
of gourmet cooking, Child’s claims for French superiority did not always work.
As American viewers increasingly voiced their attachment to older forms of
ethnic foods and newer embraces of ethnic cuisine, they sometimes questioned
Child’s adaptions. This didn’t mean she backed down. For instance, when irate
viewers complained that Child’s “Lasagne a la Francaise” was hardly a
respectful appropriation of an Italian classic, Child acknowledged that it was
not meant to be Italian but that that did not matter because French know-how
was so central to cuisine generally: “We should be thankful to the Italians for
having invented lasagna-shaped pastas,” she allowed but then added viewers
should also thank the French “for their fine cooking methods that make such a
splendid dish possible.” French technique was presented as a kind of stand-in
for France’s coherence. Child raises these hard questions—harder than could be
visible in her shows but not so hard that WGBH viewers didn’t think about them.
How did The French Chef make sense in an increasingly diverse and racially
complex cooking landscape? What did it say about the place of food in
negotiating that world? How can it be made sense of in the context of other
WGBH programming that mentioned France or contemporary French politics or
racial, sexual, and social dissension in the US?; These questions speak to the
ways that the French Chef was part of a broader phenomenon that put food at the
center of Americans’ politics and culture in the 1960s.

Tracey Deutsch

Deutsch is associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. She teaches, researches, and writes in the areas of food studies, gender and women’s history, the history of capitalism, and modern US history. Deutsch is the author of Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Government, and American Grocery Stores, 1919-1968 (2010 University of North Carolina Press). She has also published essays on food and labor in The Oxford Handbook of Food History and in the Radical History Review. She is currently researching a book project on the life of Julia Child and the politics of gourmet food in the mid-century US.

Credits

Adviser Consulted During the Creation of this Collection: Elaine Tyler May, Regents Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Minnesota, writes about 20th-Century United States History. Her books include studies of American families in the Cold War era, marriage and divorce in the Progressive era, childlessness and birth control, and co-edited collections on American popular culture in an international context, and the relationship between memoir and history.